Problems Nesting with Vegas Pro 10d

[David Jasany]

I just struggled through a Vegas Pro 10d HDV project with video and photo montages. My PC is a i7 930, 6GB, Win7 Pro, Service Pack 1.

All was going great until I began nesting the child projects into the parent project. There were 4 children project and the entire project with all the children projects came to about 1 hr. I have heavy use of Pixelan spice transitions for the photo montages.My first sign of something wrong was very sluggish Vegas response while working on the parent project. Then I noticed the audio on one project track was flatlined on the parent project. I eventually determined it was an wma file in the child project and I replaced it with a mp3. This fixed the audio but the sluggish performance continued. Does Vegas support wma files?

Then all sorts of odd things started happening. Ripple edit didn't work. I couldn't make crossfades. Multiple Vegas white screens. Lots of time spent waiting for Vegas to respond. Sometimes I can't open the parent project, then Vegas eventually whitescreens. I checked memory a few times and didn't notice anything strange with it or processor utilization.

I hopefully got a good render off this project so I'm hoping I'm done with it. Any ideas of what to look at for this problem? I really like nesting but it seems like every time I use it with later releases of Vegas there are problems. I've also had problems in the past with frequent use of Pixelan transitions, but that was with my old slow XP PC.

I'm not even sure nesting caused the problem, but it is when all the problems began. And the problems I described were in both the parent nest and child projects.

Thanks for your comments.

[Dustin Moore]

One aspect of nesting is that everytime Vegas gets focus it has to make sure that every
file still exists and is unmodified. If you use file types like avi or wav, Vegas can do this
very fast. I have noticed that with lots of flac or mpeg 2 transport stream files in the nested
project, this takes a lot of time and occaisionally leads to weirdness.

In fact, when I have hundreds of m2ts files, I sometimes join them to a single m2ts file
and edit with that because it can be loaded much faster. Or convert to cineform AVIs.

I would imagine that wma is a fairly weird format to be using on the timeline.It probably
has to use unreliable/bloated microsoft SDK calls to access the data.
I recommend converting wma to compressed .wav wave to make life easy on Vegas.

As for the photos, if you are rending at high quality there is a lot of downsampling that Vegas
has to do. You might want to pre-render these segments or downsample the image in photoshop to
a lower resolution (provided you aren't zooming/cropping a bunch) to make Vegas's life easier.

On really complex comps I render to a new track on the area around the photo comps.
I don't know if the pixellan plugins are a problem but I would not doubt it. Pre-rendering
that region and muting the source would probably help.

[David Jasany]

Thanks Dustin. After I made the post I checked the Pixilan website and there is a SpiceMaster program compatibility update for Vegas 10.x. I installed the update and didn't see any change in Vegas operation. In fact, I can't even open my nested parent project file. Vegas will stop responding and white screen.

I don't know if I'm having Vegas problems or PC problems. Normally my PC works great, however, while running DVD Architect and Adobe Photoshop Elements this afternoon the Adobe product stopped responding. This is the first time it's done that.

My system drive/program drive is a SSD. Anyone have a suggestion for how I could determine if my Vegas problems are the program or PC related?

Thanks.

[Magnus Helander]

There is an option where you can tell Vegas not to offline/release media when Vegas looses focus.
This means you can't replace a media file if it is used in an open project, but it will make switching in and out of Vegas faster.
I think 10d creates audio proxy files for WMA media, try batch converting to wav/mp3
A lot of people are reporting problems when using very big still images with vegas.

[David Jasany]

Thanks Magnus. Yesterday I came across the option "close media files when not the active application" in preferences. I unchecked it and I was then able to open my master project. This previously could not be opened (or I didn't give it enough time to open before cancelling it). I rechecked it and again had problems opening the file. I again unchecked it, and the file opened. As I'm done with the project, I didn't try any further editing.

I thought Vegas 10 elliminated the problem with putting large still images on the timeline? My photo montages all had the original 3648 x 2736 stills.

Other than a lot of motion and Spice transitions, my project was very simple. No color correction or effects. Each of the 4 child projects only had 2-4 tracks.

I'm not sure what to do next time. Resize photos? Use Spice transitions sparingly? Stop nesting?

Thanks,
Dave

[Magnus Helander]

for the photos, try to make them lower resolution with same size and name - most likely they are 300dpi or similar.

If you haven't used IrfanView start now ;) - it's the best piece of freeware sofware for windows there is.
It has a batch and rename mode which can do almost anything.
(For file name manipulation use Ant Renamer)

Then you can make a folder /photos with two subfolders /hires & /lowres
Start by putting all you hires in /photos/hires folder
Batch convert all of them using irfan and downrez to 72 dpi *with the same filename* and output to /photos folder. (/lowres empty for now)
Start editing away and import from /photos.
When you want to master - close your project and move all your lowres 72 dpi photos to /photos/lowres
Then move all files in /photos/hires one step up, to /photos
Now re-open the project and vegas will read the hires, since they are the same name and folder.

Sort of poor mans proxy generation, but it should speed up vegas and your workflow.
There is no way to tell how spice interacts with vegas, try mailing support and ask them for advice

Good luck!
/m

[David Jasany]

Magnus, I've been using Irfanview for several years for batch resizing for Vegas projects. I just didn't think I needed to do that anymore with Vegas 10.

[Dustin Moore]

There are two reasons to downsample the stills. The first reason is that if Vegas is improperly
downsizing the pixels, one will get aliasing effects. The second reason is that if Vegas is
properly downsizing the pixels, the operation is slow because quality is slow. Especially if
you are re-doing it for each frame.

By downsizing in irfan or a good app, you are pre-anti aliasing so Vegas does not have to
to it improperly or waste time doing it properly.

I don't know anything in particular about the spice plugins. I would imagine they are a bit
"heavier" than the vegas transitions so if you are having trouble you might lower the
number of different types of pixelan plugins. No idea about your computer. It is probably
fine though.

[Magnus Helander]

Slightly OT, but anyway...I think this whole "lets do full HD production on the desktop" is challenging, most machines in a sane budget range just are not powerful enough - dual i7 / Xeon machines are out of range for most people who do not run a post production house or is a broadcaster.

There are great plugins, raylight and cineform which creates proxies, but then add stills to match 1080i from a 14 megapixel DSLR camera, filters and effects killing the CPU, disk write/read speed problem where eSATA is not really enough, forget standard harddrives, RAID units are required for any kind of decent realtime playback and operation.
Render times are long on complex projects, and the GPU acceleration is not delivering IMHO - unless, of course, you have CS5 with the Mercury engine, which appears to be a killer feature

Win7 64 is great, and Intel is catching up with SandyBridge achitecture, but there are design problems and recalls last time I checked.

HD on windows desktop is still doable, but there are many bottlenecks and surprises.
From what I read the situation is the same with Edius, Premiere (to some extent) and Avid Studio.
In a year things will be better, we are transitioning if you ask me.